Esmeralda Contreras-Castañeda

Background. Gratitude is a human strength that promotes well-being; however, it is important to consider culture when constructing scales. 

Objective. To develop and validate a culturally adapted Mexican Gratitude Scale for youth, establishing its psychometric properties: reliability, internal structure, convergent validity, and criterion validity.

Design. The participants were 442 Mexican young people with a mean age of 20.81 years from three regions of Mexico.

Results. The initial 28-item scale underwent systematic refinement through Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). This psychometric validation process yielded a final 9-item instrument characterized by a robust two-dimensional factorial structure: personal gratitude and emotional gratitude. The CFA results confirmed this structure through excellent model fit indices (CFI = .98; NFI = .97) and demonstrated significant internal consistency for personal gratitude (ω = .89) and emotional gratitude (ω = .88). The scale provided evidence for convergent validity through significant correlations. Personal gratitude showed moderate associations with optimism (r = .40), positive vision (r = .37), affective resources (r = .30), and hope (r = .43), while emotional gratitude exhibited stronger relationships with optimism (r = .54), positive vision (r = .51), affective resources (r = .42), and hope (r = .52). Discriminant validity was evidenced by young people who do not report any type of mental disease scoring higher on gratitude.

Conclusion. The psychometric properties of the Mexican Gratitude Scale proved to be acceptable, facilitating its use and application in the general and clinical population for future research.